worth of charity to the whole town. You weaken its intelligence, its enterprise; you deaden the piety and morality of the people.

"The churches need a revival. No institution in America is more corrupt than her churches. No thirty thousand men and women are so bigoted and narrow as the thirty thousand ministers.

"A real revival of religion-it was never more needed. Why are men and women so excited now? Why do they go to the meeting-houses, and listen to doctrines that insult the common sense of mankind? They are not satisfied with their religious condition. They feel their want. . . . This movement shows how strong is the religious faculty in man.

"In the name of Democracy, politicians use the deep, patriotic feeling of the people to destroy the best institutions of America and the world. In the name of God, ministers use this mightiest religious feeling to impose on us things yet more disastrous.

"Let you and me remember that religion is wholeness, not mutilation; that it is life, and not death; that it is a service with every limb of this body, every faculty of this spirit; that we are not to take the world on halves with God, or on sevenths, giving Him only the lesser fraction, and taking the larger ourselves; it is to spread over and consecrate the whole life, and make it divine."

This was the voice of a Parker of Lexington where Nathaniel of old defied the British battalion and said to his handful of Minute Men-"If they mean to have war, let it begin here!" The preacher was no less of a soldier. His brave stand did not go unheeded. All that was genuine in the revival that began in 1857 heartened the nation and gave it the spiritual strength to survive, both North

and South, the struggle through disunion to reunion in the sixties.

And the ideal that Parker exalted, the true revival of religion, came nearest to realization a decade after his death in 1860 when Dwight L. Moody began justifying to his generation the faith that made lives whole.

CHAPTER XVI

ERA OF THE STRAIGHT GOSPEL

There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold-
Away on the mountains wild and bare,
Away from the tender Shepherd's care,
Away from the tender Shepherd's care.

Words by ELIZABETH CLEPHANE.
Music by IRA Sankey.

INGING softly blended with the sweet tones of

ST

distant pipes of an organ whose music strayed on

after the three hundred voices died away. The man who a little while ago had been telling of his innermost life, making it poignantly akin to the experience of every life, who had been praying with the very thoughts that welled up in the minds of his hearers, who had led them in the hymn that left their hearts a-tremble, this man was now speaking in the dim light with the fainter and fainter strains of the organ following to his last syllable. "Let us now go out and gather on the hill under the stars," he was saying, "and there let us answer the call of the spirit within us."

And so they filed after him, these three hundred collegians, chosen of their fellows for what they were doing, and soon they were met beneath the night sky of Northfield, there upon Round Top, the hill that Dwight Lyman

Moody loved and chose for his final place of rest. For a moment there was silence, a silence in which the three hundred were struggling either to speak or to keep themselves from speaking.

One youth began haltingly. Then the words of selfrevelation, yearning for guidance and governance, groping for a fullness of faith to carry him through, rushed from his lips. An impact of suddenly lucid understanding struck the others. Vicariously each had been uttering what had been in him to say. One of them in later years confessed gratitude to the young man who had spoken so eloquently for him and convinced him that his mind was freed without the need of his baring his soul also. He went down the hill, packed his bag and departed. But the rest stayed on till all found peace and a benediction.

It was the Northfield Conference, the legacy and memorial of Moody, America's greatest evangelist who had prayed personally with seven hundred and fifty thousand men and women and preached to a hundred million and helped more than a million to find the way to their God. The schools, Mount Hermon and Northfield, in his ancestral Western Massachusetts village, are his visible monument. Into them he poured thousands of dollars. With his other projects-like the Bible Institute and a church in Chicago-they shared in the one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars earned in royalties by the hymnal of Moody and Ira D. Sankey. At the end of his life this man, who had renounced a youthful ambition to amass a fortune, left just five hundred dollars, and that by mistake. He had assisted a neighbor in distress and the man had drawn up a mortgage for that five hundred dollars which Moody knew nothing about.

To Northfield Moody also gave himself, his organizing